


The Old Ways

by tkp (lettered)



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-30
Updated: 2009-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-10 01:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/93871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettered/pseuds/tkp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spock struggles to find his place in the universe after the events of Reboot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Old Ways

**Author's Note:**

> Per Jungle Kitty's [ List of Cliches](http://www.invisibleplanets.com/kirk_spock/KSCliches.htm), you should never name a Trek fic after a song by Loreena McKinnett. You probably also shouldn't write a fic "inspired" by a song by Loreena McKinnett. OOPS. IT SANG TO ME. It's a good song! Luckily no Sarah MacLachlan was used in the production of this fic.

On Vulcan, there was so little water.

There were no oceans, nor any seas. Spock heard tell of them in his mother's tales, stories of home, "songs of sail", she called them. We come from the water, she told him, and we return to it. The way the waves come ashore, and back out to sea, said she. Some people hear the sea—in dreams, so the story goes—calling them home.

Home to her blue planet, its face awash with water, fed with dihydrogen oxide. She herself heard a different call, she said. Her home was a different place. We come from dust, so the story goes on Vulcan, and as dust we fall. It wasn't by a shore that she died. It was as sand, as one of them.

On land in San Francisco, Spock felt drowned. Water was in the air like dew, every day a new wash upon him, far too fresh. It was not familiar, not even familial. Mother's tales had been of another life, beginnings foreign from his own, before she had chosen his father. Water, like the Starfleet uniform, was only wished upon, like stars. It was not home for any one of them.

After Earth was saved, Spock left the stars behind.

On New Vulcan, there was little water. There were no oceans, nor any seas. Even the wind on New Vulcan sang of his heritage, the hot whip without wet, the sting of sand. The few spices could never be the same, the stones striped with too much red, but no where was there blue. This was the land of his life—perhaps not the land of his forefathers, but this was of his father, and of his mother, after she had chosen him.

With the death of his mother, the laying aside of Starfleet, Spock fully thought that he would achieve the _kolinahr,_ the purge of all emotion. His work on the new colony would cleanse him; the air there would crucify him. This was not a punishment. This was the weight of Vulcan rite. Spock could feel the flames of the ritual tapers burned beside him. He could hear the voice of Vulcan ceremony; it called like home.

So Spock went to new Vulcan. He held in his mind the _Vok-Van-Kal t'To'oveh_ for Amanda Grayson. He wore the heavy, knitted tunic, the _koma_ of Vulcan ritual. He smelled the smells of incense, and the slight too-tangy twinge of salt and something else—sweat, which once he thought must be what water was. He smelled her, and the hot, arid air of a world no water touched. He heard the tam-tam, _kep_, ring for her remembrance.

In waking hours, the Vulcans left held no ceremony for the Vulcans lost. There had been too many, and there was too much to do besides. They moved stones into the central square of the new colony, and strung the _kep_ between them. It hung between its silent sentinels like a gate to their past. In dreams, the sound of it called them all.

They planted Vulcan plants and the planned new Vulcan edifices, which they erected with new stone not of Vulcan. They selected the high council—new elders, they called them, which should have been a contradiction in terms. The effort to rebuild was long and hot and hard. Sometimes Spock would stand still, waiting for the whisper of sand-stricken wind. As dust, she fell.

Sometimes, in those silent moments, another Vulcan—Stonn, T'Pau, Sarek, the elder Spock—would suddenly stand as motionless as he. Between them strung a gateway. Between them, the call of the _kep_.

United in their losses as they were, their new nation was not without dissent. The issue was adaptation. The few plants from Vulcan died, while the new plants specifically engineered for this new sandscape thrived. Certain traditions could be transplanted, they all acknowledged, and other ways must be changed completely. They agreed on this: the arguments were not so simple as keeping everything the same versus forward motion. No Vulcans left were so emotional as to deny common sense because they were nostalgic.

But even _kolinahr_, the height of pure logic, was steeped in history. Mystery shrouded the final level, achieved only through mighty ritual, performed by a master swathed in _koma,_ and the ringing of the _kep_. There was not time for such procedure, Spock reasoned. What was more: there was not reason.

What they faced now was not merely the grafting of long held ken to the face of this new planet. The stone tablets of tradition had all been smashed to sand; the granite was all gone. They faced reformation, recreation, the reconsideration of old behaviors, of the paradigm. This was a new time. Sand, when the wind swept, shifted like waves.

Spock's grief was not the living fire it had been. It could be handled now, as if on a candle, small but steady—controlled, yet ever continued, as if of a rite. That flame fed the fire of their reconstruction; it fueled the new biology they must adapt to their new geology, the new technology they must fit to new meteorology. It should not be extinguished; it must not be. _Kolinahr_ was a legacy of another land, the birthright of another people.

Spock found that when he meditated, he did not light the new candles modeled on the wax molded from an insect of old Vulcan. He did not wear the _pelal_ which used to sing against his skin. He did not poise his hands in the posture of deep contemplation, the _nahr_ position of subjugation of emotion. He did not smell the scents that used to bring him back. That space of silence became singular, a personal spirituality molded to himself and not out of custom.

So it was with all of them. The first _kal-if-fee_ performed in the square was for two young Vulcans, surviving because they had been visiting other worlds, and knew less of their homeland than many of the dead. The bells of the procession were made with new Vulcan metal. The cloth of the female _tu'ruth_ was of a fresh-made dye. The wind had a different sharpness, and the _plak tow_ of the male looked more like young eagerness than anything. The _kep_, when sounded, took them not into the past, but to a new future—another generation, and another Vulcan.

The eldest of them, the elder Spock, had long been ready for this new Vulcan. He well knew how to be from them, but not of them, how to forge new fires in the ashes of those past. Even in his own world, Spock suspected, Spock the elder had heard a different call. His home had been a different place. Regarding the eagerness of the young male, nothing like blood fever, there was a way _Tela'hat Spohkh_'s eyes shone, as if entirely in favor.

That night, Spock the Younger went alone into the desert. On another land, this was the start of the _kolinahr_, the purging of the self, the oneness with the sand, the dusk, the dark, the dust. He knelt down on the ground, and called forth the vision of the symbol of _fullara_, the first ritual of _kolinahr_. He spake the sacred words, ingrained in him like the biting wind. He raised his hand in the Vulcan gesture of cleansing, and drew the lines down in the sand.

Spock waited in the night without dreaming, the symbol of all their past before him. The night was cold and blank, the sand pale. He waited for the wind to feel the same. He waited for the scent of spices, and the tang of her salt skin. He waited for the call.

All he could see were stars, singing songs of sail.

Spock returned to the square the next morning. The stones stood tall and straight, the _kep_ hung silent between them. It had been several months since the saving of Earth. This was new, too—Vulcan had no moon, while New Vulcan suffered tides, in and out. On this planet, Spock saw now, he only was a satellite, circling something to which he never could return.

That day Spock told the high council of his plan to return to Starfleet. United in their losses as they were, his decision was not without dissent. In their discourse he could feel the heaviness of the hard-knit _koma_. He could remember standing before them before; he could remember the voice of Vulcan ceremony, and the ringing of the _kep_. He remembered, but they did not call. His elder self, he felt, knew what it was he heard.

After all, there were other songs, other tales, stories of home, she called them. We come from stars, another story goes, and we return to them. As stars we fall.

In his dreams, Spock the Younger heard new things. He could hear Captain Kirk. He could hear Nyota; he could hear the _Enterprise_.

They sounded like the sea.


End file.
